Force of Nature

“Every day I feel different. Every day it’s either masc or femme or in between. Every day is goth or bohemian,” Princess Nokia tells me. “When I wake up and feel an energy, I coexist with it.”

The performer, born Destiny Frasqueri, is fluid in more ways than one. “I’m a gender-nonconforming androgynous person,” she says. “But some people are like, ‘What happened to your tomboy phase?’ ”

That question is a reference to Frasqueri’s breakthrough 2017 single “Tomboy,” off the album 1992 Deluxe. The song’s music video sees her on a basketball court in an oversized T-shirt pulled over a sweatshirt. She later raps about her “little titties” and “phat belly.” Those who inquire about her lost era of tomboyishness seem not to realize that Frasqueri’s presentation will never be absolute and thus defies tidy categorization.

In a culture that encourages us to divide—by religion, economics, race, age, sexuality, the list never ends—the multihyphenate Princess Nokia persona sets out to represent the complexity of women, artists and human beings. She’s a lover and a fighter. She’s a rapper and a singer. She’s masculine and feminine. She’s a pragmatist and a dreamer. And no matter the haters, Frasqueri is unstoppable.

“It’s so much easier to understand artistic men,” Frasqueri remarks. “But women—especially brown women—we think they have psychological issues.”

It’s a given that career-minded women have to work harder to earn respect and dollars. In hip-hop specifically, female up-and-comers often have a male sponsor. Lil Wayne ushered Nicki Minaj into the spotlight; Timbaland collaborated with Missy Elliott. Even with a co-signer, the unofficial rule is that urban female entertainers subject themselves to sexualization. Today, rising rappers such as Megan Thee Stallion, City Girls and Saweetie seemingly have to perform as vixen archetypes as well as perform flawless bars.

The number of female rappers signed to major labels has dropped precipitously since the late-1980s and early-1990s heyday, when more than 40 women had major deals at one time. In 2010, three did. To this day, only six female rappers have reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Those granted stardom are a reflection of mainstream values and ideals, which are often sexist and racist. But celebrity also offers a means of challenging those norms. By acknowledging these truths and refusing to be anybody but her authentic self, Frasqueri is causing a disruption.

“I love being proud of how studly I am, how boyish and how manly I can appear. I love being androgynous,” she says. “I feel beautiful like that. It’s just another beautiful side of me.”

Beyond “Tomboy,” Frasqueri’s catalogue feels boundless. On 2014’s Metallic Butterfly, she explores trip-hop mixed with sci-fi-inspired pop and Afro-Latin beats. The first track, “Dimensia,” announces on top of reverberations, “Welcome to Metallic Butterfly, where you are now free / On this planet, you are now released of all plague, hate and disease.” She suggests young girls seek out respect and describes herself as an anomaly, sliding back and forth between spoken word and chants over bubbly beats. 1992 Deluxe stars a darker, swaggier Frasqueri who doesn’t ask for respect; she demands it. Her power stance widens on “G.O.A.T,” on which she rattles with the profound confidence born of being a “weird girl.”

Just when the industry assumed Frasqueri would stay on the path of hard anthems, she abandoned bravado on the 2018 mixtape A Girl Cried Red, a nod to the post-hardcore-punk-rock subgenre of emo. There, she trades rapping for singing of loneliness and depression.

Her forthcoming album promises to be a layered and stunning work. Untitled at press time, the project will be her first to benefit from having new legal and management representation.

“Sugar Honey Iced Tea (S.H.I.T.),” her newest single, presents a version of Frasqueri that honors her previous musical tropes by weaving them together. In the track’s video, a parody of beauty pageants, jazz horns and gospel vocals erupt as the defiant rapper gazes at her reflection in a dressing-room mirror; a line of competitors zhuzh in the background.

“These bitches don’t like me / These bitches wanna fight me / And doing shit just to spite me.” When she wins the pageant, she floats down the runway, resembling the Virgin Mary.

“I know I hold my principles and my virtues so deeply that you will never take me from that peacefulness,” she says of the video’s meaning. “And you can never take that crown away from me.”

A long white lace veil and a large crown indeed adorn Frasqueri in that video, and the song’s lyrics also revisit tales from her less-than-perfect past. “I’m on the train throwing soup,” she raps, referencing her reaction to a man on New York’s L train who had been slinging racial slurs at a group of teenage boys. Frasqueri’s soup-throwing made headlines two years ago, and it’s a moment she doesn’t want us to forget. “I love to throw hands on racists, bigots and scum,” she raps. Frasqueri ends the video by passing the crown to a young girl.

“That’s who I am in real life. I’m hood, and I’m very involved at the same time, and that gives me a lot of wisdom,” she says. “It allows me to love myself and love my people. It allows me to see how conditioned people around me are and not to blame them for their pain. It also makes me strong enough to know that I am not passive, and if it really comes to that, we can take it there. I need to fight for the things that matter.”

Frasqueri identifies as a santera, a priestess of Santería, her family’s practice. Santería is a religion that took root among Afro-Cuban slaves in the Caribbean. Many of its practices are kept secret to avoid persecution, but the faction is known to worship the gods of West Africa, known as orishas, who are seen as nature personified.

Perhaps her worship of Mother Nature is why Frasqueri wanted to embody the four elements in PLAYBOY, complete with snakes and doves. “Snakes are earth, and they ground you and make you feel pure and whole,” she says. “I love my body. I know that I embody the four elements in a very profound way, as every woman does, and as every person does.”

Frasqueri, born in New York, grew up without the guidance of her own mother. Her childhood had been marked by a loving family with a fondness for hip-hop and a beloved goth babysitter who introduced her to heavy metal. Then, when Frasqueri was still a child, her mother died of AIDS. Shortly after, her grandmother died. Frasqueri was then placed in foster care; at the age of 16 she ran away from an abusive foster home in East Harlem.

“I’ve been called hurtful things based on who I am, on my spiritualism, on my astrological planning chart, on my duality.”

Frasqueri found comfort in New York’s queer community. The maestros of the city’s LGBTQ nightlife taught her how to entertain while standing up for her fellow outsiders. Today she continues to empathize with the often forgotten, including the 3.4 million people in Puerto Rico struggling to rebuild after Hurricane Maria tore through the island in September 2017. That month, Frasqueri set up an independent disaster-relief fund to aid the territory her family is from. In June 2018, she canceled a performance in Mexico City to focus on relief work. She founded Hood 2 La Gente, a campaign to support communities affected by the natural disaster. Last February, she headlined a show at the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras campus. The event was unlike any of her previous productions: Organized by a university queer-activism collective, it opened with an act that spotlighted performers from the city’s alternative LGBTQ scene.

“It was something very powerful for me,” she says. The show was free; no bouncers surrounded the small stage, and the audience was treated to an impromptu meet-and-greet.

“There’s so much racism, homophobia, transphobia and corruption,” she says of Puerto Rico, which, as of 2018, has a poverty rate of almost 45 percent. “It was nice that everyone was in a place where they didn’t have to fear, because they were surrounded by people just like them.”

The people in that venue, on that warm evening in the island’s capital, likely understood Frasqueri better than many of her peers. In an industry run on the iPhones of agents, managers and publicists, she chooses to work with a small crew and without a record deal.

“I always have to fight for my seat at the table, because no one is going to give it to me—and I’ve accepted that,” she says.

Frasqueri has formidable engagement on social media, with more than 1 million monthly listeners on Spotify and almost 40 million views on YouTube to date. The “Sugar Honey Iced Tea” music video broke 1 million views within a month of its release. At the same time, Frasqueri points out that people have deemed her “crazy,” “fake” and a “fraud” because, according to her, she makes people uncomfortable.

“I find that really unfortunate, because I make it so easy. I’ve made it very easy for people to understand me,” she says.

Frasqueri could be perceived as a woman of contradictions: She loves empowering others, but she’ll fight if she needs to. She wants to maintain artistic freedom, but she signed a distribution deal. “Gemini,” another track from her new album, may be the most concise suggestion of who Princess Nokia is: “Two heads, one eye,” she raps, accompanied by swirling instruments.

“In my new album I’m trying to embody how special my sign makes me and how unique it’s made my career,” she says. “I’ve been called lots of hurtful things based on who I am, on my spiritualism, on my astrological planning chart, on my duality.”

Despite the heartache that comes with feeling misunderstood, Frasqueri’s connections to spirituality, nature and the world keep her going. “I make great art, and I make art that inspires others. That’s all that matters. The other stuff that comes after, that’s up to God, you know?” she says. “When the world needs reminding of my greatness, I’m there to remind them, but I’m not here to whine. I continue.”